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Vinegar is sour, sugar sweet, but to the hypnotised mind vinegar can be sweet, sugar sour. The sourness or sweetness is not in the vinegar or sugar, but in the mind. The heart also is the subject of the mind. My emotions are like my physical feelings, the result of association, and my character is the result of accumulated past experiences with their resultant associations and reactions crystallising into habits of mind and heart summed up in the word, character. These things like all the rest that are made of the stuff of associations are not permanent or binding but fluid and mutable, "''anityāḥ sarvasaṁskārāḥ"''. If my friend blames me, I am grieved; that is an association and not binding. The grief is not the result of the blame but of an association in the mind. I can change the association so far that blame will cause me no grief, praise no elation. I can entirely stop the reactions of joy and grief by the same force that created them. They are habits of the mind, nothing more. In the same way though with more difficulty I can stop the reactions of physical pain and pleasure so that nothing will hurt my body. If I am a coward today, I can be a hero tomorrow. The cowardice was merely the habit of associating certain things with pain and grief and of shrinking from the pain and grief; this shrinking and the physical sensations in the vital or nervous man which accompany it are called fear, and they can be dismissed by the action of the mind which created them. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/13/yoga-and-hypnotism#p2</ref>
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It is not however a fact that the whole nature has to be emptied of the old things before there can be the Light and Grace. It is done usually in different parts of the nature at different times… Now it is the physical mind, physical vital and body that have to be emptied—these always take longer than the others because the physical is more full of old habits, more obstinate in keeping and always repeating them, more slow to receive anything new or to change. But by the detachment and steady rejection and reliance on the Mother's force, this obstinacy can be overcome and the cup emptied for filling with the Divine Light. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/30/emptiness-voidness-blankness-and-silence#p13</ref>
The important thing is to get rid of the habit of the invasion of troubling thoughts, wrong feelings, confusion of ideas, unhappy movements… when the mind is quiet and at peace, the Force can work more easily. It should be possible to see things that have to be changed in you without being upset or depressed; the change is the more easily done. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/29/silence#p18</ref>
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…to succeed in having a precise, concrete, clear, definite thought on a certain subject, you must make an effort, gather yourself together, hold yourself firm, concentrate. And the first time you do it, it literally hurts, it is tiring! But if you don't make a habit of it, all your life you will be living in a state of irresolution. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/08/13-june-1956#p37</ref>
The whole automatic habit of millennia must be changed into a conscious action, directly guided by the supreme Consciousness. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/agenda/07/january-22-1966#p15</ref>
==Going Beyond Habits in Integral Yoga==
<center>Good habits are indispensable so long as one acts out of habit. But to attain the supreme goal of yoga, one must abandon all ties, whatever they may be. And good habits are also a tie which must one day be abandoned when one wants to obey and is able to obey nothing but the one supreme impulse, the Will of the Supreme. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/16/14-april-1965#p3</ref></center>
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